Guitar chords

These are the chords that come up most often in the charts published on the site. Learning them on guitar before the rest opens up the largest part of the repertoire: the figure says how many charts each one appears in.

• G141
• C132
• Am109
• D90
• Em89
• F83
• A76
• E56
• Dm54
• Bm54

These 10 chords are enough to play a good share of the catalogue. The rest of this page groups them by family, from the most common to the rarest.

Six strings, tuned E A D G B E from low to high. Open shapes — the ones that let strings ring in the first few frets — are both the easiest and the loudest, which is why they come first. Barre chords follow: harder on the hand, but they slide along the neck, one shape giving twelve chords.

Read the diagram as if the instrument were standing upright in front of you: the strings run vertically, the lowest on the left, and the horizontal bars are the frets. A dot marks a finger; a circle above a string means it rings open; a cross means it is not played. A thick bar across the top means the shape starts at the nut; otherwise the number on the left gives the fret of the first row shown. A solid bar across several strings is a barre: one finger lays them all down.